On the Slow Train by Michael Williams Page B

stick with the slower train, which is looking very self-important, with No. 67013 and its grand-sounding Welsh name
Dyfrbont Pontcysyllte
on the front. ‘What does it mean?’ I ask one of the stewards. ‘Haven’t a clue’ is the reply. A call through to the Welsh Assembly press office later reveals it is the name of Pontcysyllite aqueduct, which I’d passed earlier in the day, and means literally the ‘bridge connected to the river’.
    And so we are off, heading for the capital, the hooter of
Dyfrbont Pontcysyllite
echoing off the castle walls, past the remains of the Benedictine abbey built by Roger de Montgomery, William the Conquerer’s favourite lieutenant, in 1083, and wrecked not in any battle between English and Welsh but by Thomas Telford, who built the road to London, cutting the journey time from four days to sixteen hours, destroying much of the abbey in the process. A more modern monument is the great Severn Bridge Junction signal box, built by the London and North Western Railway and the largest surviving mechanical signal box in Britain, with a frame accommodating 180 levers. Many of these are no longer used, but from his perch the signalman here controls a vast network of upper quadrant, lower quadrant and colour light signals, which fortunately are set to remain operated in their quaint nineteenth-century way for the foreseeable future.
    We can no longer travel on the Great Central’s original main line, since much of the track on Edward Watkin’s route from Nottingham to London has long been lifted. (Although a group of enthusiasts have preserved the stretch from Leicester to Loughborough as a splendid Edwardian time capsule – the only double-track preserved railway in Britain and the only place where two steam locomotives regularly pass at speed travelling in opposite directions.) Instead, we are to traverse the old Great Central’s second-best line, through High Wycombe, which it built jointly with the Great Western Railway to relieve congestion on the approaches to Marylebone. This really was the last main line of the steam era. Expensively constructed, it was opened as late as 1906 and widely condemned as an imperial extravagance, already redundant at the dawn of the motor age. Yet it survived Beeching and now carries a busy service from Birmingham to London.
    There are only a handful of us in the first-class restaurant car for the journey through the Chilterns on this sunny evening. Shame, since this is one of the last opportunities to dine in style on any service train in Britain. Thomas Ableman, who does the marketing for the line, is pleased with his product. He joins me for the rest of the journey, and although he appears too young to remember the nationalised railway, let alone Beeching, and with his thick-rimmed glasses looks more like a don than a railwayman, he has just seen off an attempt by rival Virgin to run their own regular service to Wrexham. This would have provided two extra trains a day but, ever sensitive to bad publicity, the canny Virgin boss Richard Branson backed off. In fact it was misleading, as some newspapers did, to portray W & S as a minnow squashed by a corporate giant, since it is part of the mighty Deutsche Bahn, the German state railway, which also owns Britain’s biggest rail freight company and Chiltern Railways, the lucrative franchise that runs through the Buckinghamshire stockbroker belt into London, not to mention a half-share of the London Overground – the newest part of the Tube. And wasn’t this the kind of cut-throat competition that rail privatisation was supposed to be about?
    We gather speed through Wellington, with the 1,300 foot bulk of the Wrekin to the right blocking out the setting sun, and stop at Telford, where our restaurant starts to fill up with tired-looking reps, laptops under their arms and ID cards dangling like necklaces. As well as providing restaurant cars, Ableman tells me, the